Cooperative Relational Database Querying Using Multiple Knowledge Bases

We present in this paper an approach for providing cooperativeness in database querying using artificial intelligence techniques. The main focus is a cooperative interface that assists non-experienced and casual users in extracting useful answers from a relational database. We propose an architecture for our approach that comprises two knowledge bases which store rules that describe the application domain and that guide the process of query formulation and answering. A subset of SQL is used for expressing queries, and the cooperative interface relieves the user from knowing its full syntax and also the database schema.